By examining the recurrence of his invented form, the duplex, throughout The Tradition, poets at any stage of their writing can learn how to put together a cohesive manuscript small presses want to publish.
Tag: poetry
Review: Disease of Kings by Anders Carlson-Wee
With Disease of Kings (W.W. Norton, 2023), Anders Carlson-Wee has truly come into his own as a storyteller, detailing the lives of a speaker based on himself and his friend North in poignant and amusing detail.
Review: Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
This book is equal parts about culture, family, and self-discovery, and likely every reader can relate to the struggle with those things. Not every poet can bridge the gap between their own experiences and others, but Blanco does it expertly by incorporating food, speech, music, and the smallest physical details in his poems.
Review: Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
Although the intent of individual poems in this ambitious collection is not always clear, Smith’s found poetry drives home the reality of harms done to the people of this country, especially to black people enslaved by white people.
Meeting Ryan Adams
As the minutes ticked by, more and more people seemed to give up. Even I started to doubt he would appear. But then the black SUVs with the flashing lights started to show up in front of the barricades and the metal loading door and we knew he must be close.
Winter Solstice: A Poem
I wrote this poem in 2019, revised it last year, submitted it a few places with no luck, and then just kind of gave up on it. It's basically a play-by-play of the shortest day of the year in Alaska, but I think it's the longest poem I've ever written!
2021 in Poems
Continuing the tradition of last year's summary in poems, I present to you the 2021 edition. This year was actually even more difficult for me, emotionally, than 2020, but equally productive in terms of writing, apparently.
PoPo Fest 2021
Poetry Postcard Fest is an annual event facilitated by what is now known as Cascadia Poetics Lab, which I learned about from founder Paul E. Nelson. Basically, you pay $15 to be put into a group of 30 other people around the world who have agreed to write a poem a day for a month and mail each one on a postcard. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it was, but once again, it seems my expectations exceeded reality.
Deaf & Blind: A Book Review
Paul Hostovsky’s fifteenth collection — and fifth from Main Street Rag — Deaf & Blind, is a rare find. With humor and humility, the Massachusetts author leads hearing and sighted readers through his life thus far as an American Sign Language interpreter and student, as well as the relative and friend of many Deaf and DeafBlind people, in the form of poems and stories.
2020 in Poems
To focus on the positives of 2020, I have compiled a list of poems to exemplify my writing successes this year.
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum 